Theatre of Tourism – Fran Dale and Jenny Rudd

February 22, 2011 by Leave a Comment

In their research into the social aspects of tourist photography, Haldrup and Larsen (Baerenholdt, J.  et al, 2004) refer to the Social Constructionist, Gergen, who claims that people make sense of their lives through narratives.  At at time when families are becoming increasingly fragmented, it seems the greater the need to produce narratives of the ideal family which Haldrup and Larsen argue is one of the reasons why families travel.  They maintain that performing tourist photography has become more than just documenting the holiday, that it is part of the theatre the family constructs to create the illusion of being together and whole.  Properly staged the photograph will ensure that no matter how disappointing the actual event was, it will be projected as a future memory of family harmony.

Inspired by the artist, Suzanne Moxhay’s techniques (http://www.suzannemoxhay.com), we have been experimenting with the idea of creating our own “theatre”, using scanned postcard images enlarged and fixed to transparent sheets to form the backdrop.  The scene has then been photographed to produce the image seen here. We’ll continue to experiment with the technique, one of the challenges being to get the scales and perspectives correct, before introducing our “tourists” to the performance.

Bibliography

Baerenholdt, J.  et al (2004)  Performing Tourist Places, Aldershot, Ashgate

Filed under Frances Dale '10, Jennifer Rudd '10, UCS alumni Tagged with , , , , , ,

Disciplinary power

February 8, 2011 by 1 Comment

From:

Photography: The Question of Disciplinary Power by Tracie Falcucci (2010) pg.29-30.

Disciplinary power relates to the constant threat of observation and to the control that it has over individuals.  Through a structure of segregation and partitioning, continuous surveillance can lead to a disciplined society.  The threat of continuous observation can be as powerful as the act itself and it can in certain circumstances, like within the prisons walls, seem to have absolute control.  The mechanism of disciplinary power, as Michel Foucault believed, produces information relating to the individual or social body that is being observed.  By obtaining information in this way, it increases or reinforces the power over those being surveyed which forms a complex power and knowledge relationship (Foucault, 1977). 

Through exploring the scientific and technical advancements of photography and looking at how these developments overlapped with the establishment of the police force; the two uses of photography within the judicial system can be established.  The first is to identify; to categorise individuals and to remove rights and privileges of the detained.  The second is to record information, as a document, that can be used as evidence.  Later; photography became used as a tool of surveillance beginning in the early 1900’s with the suffragettes and this is when photography within law and the institution of the museum converged.  A repetitive pattern emerged during the 1870’s within institutional portraiture and the ‘social’ and the ‘administrative’ function of the photograph allowed for the upper-class and the criminal to be represented using the same means.  Traces relating to power are evident in the ‘narrow spaces; the subjection to an unreturnable gaze; the scrutiny of gesture…and sharpness of focus’ and these, Tagg States, are repeated ‘whenever the photographer prepared an exposure, in the police cell, prison, consultation room, asylum’ Tagg (1988 p.85).  Art photography may not have the power to remove rights from individuals as John Tagg believes, but it is able to question systems of power.

 Bibliography

Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish. London, Penguin

Tagg, J. (1988) The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.

Filed under Tracie Falcucci '10 Tagged with , , , , , , ,

June 2010 – Philippe Wrigley announced as winner of thenetwerk® award 2011

January 2, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Philippe’s proposal

My project has been inspired by the continual change of the rural landscape to accommodate commercial and industrial structures, which have been so quickly adopted by the local community as landmarks. We travel through rural landscapes that are broken by these mundane structures without a second thought for the bridges, water and telecommunication towers, wind turbines, pylons, industrial or commercial plants. These functional items, a necessity of our modern lifestyle, offer a strange contradiction: once communities emphatically rejected these structures, now they are adopted as local landmarks.

John Brinckerhoff Jackson made the reference that the word “landscape” was originally used to describe a composition of man-made spaces on the land, that it is a mistake to think of a landscape as something apart from human society: a landscape is always a synthetic space, “system of space superimposed on the face of the land… to serve the community.”

I will investigate Guy Debord’s theory on psycho-geography and consider whether it can be applied in a rural context with similar affects of urban environment.  The Dérive, an awareness of characteristic changes as moving through various different areas, is about the interaction of the environmental effects on the local communities.

My intention is to explore and research various structures such as a radio or TV mast when lit up in the evening with its red lights against darkened blue sky, or the wind turbines in the mists, or the strong evening sun that highlights a water tower. The effect is to capture the aesthetical beauty to emphasise the paradox of its existence within the context of its environment.  Although this may well be seen as a visual cliché, the beauty and the beast, I hope to stimulate certain awareness about our lifestyle today as an inherent mark on our landscapes.

Filed under General, Philippe Wrigley '10, thenetwerk® award, UCS alumni Tagged with , , , , , , ,

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